Diary' of local hit man revealed in new book (with video)

One of Oakland County’s most famous arrests that took place on a small stretch of Orchard Lake Road in the early hours of a wintery February morning 38 years ago is the focus of a newly released book.

“Diary of a Motor City Hit Man,” written by Christian Cipollini and recently put on the market by Strategic Media Books out of South Carolina, tells the story of Chester Wheeler Campbell, a one-time highly feared local underworld enforcer and reputed expert-assassin who was arrested at around 3:30 a.m. Feb. 6, 1975, following a car accident with a Keego Harbor police cruiser at the corner of Orchard Lake and Commerce Roads.

After a brief chase that ended near the intersection of Orchard Lake Road and Indian Trail, officers from the Keego Harbor, Orchard Lake and Sylvan Lake Township police departments discovered a treasure trove of illicit contents in Campbell’s brand new black Oldsmobile Regency: guns, drugs, and an alleged hit list that had then-Oakland County Prosecutor L. Brooks Patterson’s name on it.

Campbell, 45 years old and a suspect in dozens of gangland homicides at the time of the incident, was booked for illegal drug possession and carrying a concealed weapon and eventually convicted at trial in Oakland County Circuit Court.

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Patterson was provided around-the-clock security in the subsequent months, even though Campbell was safely tucked away in the detention wing of the Oakland County Jail in Pontiac.

Serving nine and a half years in prison, Campbell was paroled in September 1984, only to return behind bars for the remainder of his life three years later when a search of his car via a federal informants’ tip revealed a strikingly similar cache of weapons, narcotics and what law enforcement described as another hit list. In his jacket pocket, FBI and DEA agents also discovered a loaded James Bond-style pen gun.

Stricken with hepatitis C, the 71-year old Campbell died in a Rochester, Minn., prison hospital in May 2001, and with him went what authorities believe was a deep knowledge of seemingly countless unsolved murders in state and out.

Tagged with such ominous nicknames as “Dr. Death,”“The Angel of Death,”“The Undertaker,” and “The Black Hand,” Campbell was incarcerated for over three quarters of his life, yet he still found enough time to build a colossal reputation on the streets of Metro Detroit.

In his heyday, people called him the most feared man in the Motor City, someone who by the mere mention of his name drew shivers up people’s spines, cop and crook alike.

First jailed for robbery at age 15 in 1945 and then for second-degree murder in 1955, for which he served a 13-year sentence, Campbell emerged from the penitentiary in 1968 and through contacts he met in prison, went to work as an often-utilized strong-arm man for both the Italian Mafia and some of the area’s biggest African-American drug kingpins.

FBI and Detroit Police Department files indicates he was a suspect or person of interest in more than 40 murders, both local and in other regions of the country, such as New York, California, Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

“Chester was a very, very dangerous person,” said Mike Carone, a retired FBI agent part of Campbell’s 1987 arrest. “We had heard he was the trigger man on numerous slayings. He put the fear of god into some very tough, scary people and that speaks to the kind of underworld figure he was around here. His reputation preceded him wherever he went.”

Those he was acquainted with on the street agree with Carone’s assessment.

“That was one bad dude,” said a former member of the local Mafia. “He (Campbell) got all the top assignments and was very reliable. If you were on the wrong side of any of the major players in the city and you saw Chester at your doorstep, you knew he wasn’t there to sell you encyclopedias.”

Far from a knuckle-dragging thug, Campbell was studious and cultured, despite his limited time as a free man and meager traditional educational background. He read at an almost-obsessive rate and was known to frequently ferry his ever-expanding cadre of girlfriends on trips to the symphony, museums, art galleries and the opera, always impeccably dressed and usually wearing one of his trademark hats.

On the morning of his 1975 arrest on Orchard Lake Road, Campbell was on his way to the home of his common-law wife, Mary Williams, in Commerce Township. Williams co-owned the Mason-Williams Funeral Home off Oakland Avenue in Detroit, a quite appropriate primary headquarters for Campbell and a band of misfits that included his driver and bodyguard Leroy “Bang-Bang” James and different members of drug gangs he did business with, most notably The “Murder Row” organization headed by the notorious Francis “Big Frank Nitti” Usher.

Cipolini, author of the Campbell book, is a freelance writer and investigative journalist from Pittsburgh. He is set to be featured as an organized crime expert in a string of new episodes of the hit Biography Channel television show “Gangsters — American’s Most Evil.”